While I am aware of the strengths of a quad core it seems you are not aware of their downside . . . which is they always use more power/wattage/electricity than a dual core so basically they have higher running costs, less eco and basically for what?
What is the logic in increasing your power consumption to fuel a technology that get's very little use? and lets be honest even now in late 2008 there is precious little outside the professional media content-creation arena that benefitsn from the true power of a quad.
The rule of diminishing returns sadly applies to the extra cores for most users and forum nOObzillas however you still pay for it
Botton line = Power Efficiency, look into it when you have some free time!
Lower power consumption is not just a buzzword used for laptops, Lower Power Consumption is probably the most important thing driving computer hardware design today!
If a dual-core chews through most computer tasks we throw at it and at the same time uses 50% less power . . . what;s not to like?
I think you need to learn it's not about MHz or Multicore anymore, it's about power consumption, system and memory bandwidth and years of developers cooking up some really great software that we can use.
In case you didn't try one yet Mav then you should play with a wolfdale, they are really brilliant!
used 4ghz wolfdale and wasnt impressed, a q6600 @ 3ghz quad provided snappier system performance and far more processing power. power efficiency doesnt really come into it if you have the knowledge on hardware to begin with.
take the above example, 2.4ghz q6600 did an encoding job much faster than the wolfdale dual core at 4ghz. where is the power savings comming from when you have to leave the dual core machine on for a lot longer to get your encoding done?
but i do understand where your comming from, those who dont do heavy encoding or use multi-threadded apps are probably better off spending the extra 30 quid on a slower dual core cpu and saving on average 10 quid extra a year on eleccy bills (provided both quad and dual are run on for same length of time).
false economy i say when you have to run the dual core cpu for longer periods of time to get the job done as the quad. these days with the ability of running speed step along with overclocks without issues (on the right motherboards) and the eleccy bills wont mean squat.
its a trade off at the end of the day, you want raw power then you have to pay the price for it. q6600 is still the best bang for the buck cpu, no point buying a dual core these days especially if you have to pay more than the cost of a quad for it.
